Final Causes

Author(s): Timothy L. S. Sprigge and Alan Montefiore

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 FINAL CAUSES

by Timothy L. S. Sprigge

and Alan Montefiore

I Timothy L. S. Sprigge

Two types of explanation for the occurrence or existence of

something have long been contrasted by philosophers; explana-

tion by final causes (also called teleological explanation) and

explanation by efficient causes (also called simply causal expla-

nation). The first type tells us of something else for the sake

of which that something exists or occurs; the second type tells

us of some previous existent or occurrent which produced it in

conformity with some law governing the development of things

or events out of each other.

It seems natural today to think of the latter type of explanation

as relevant to a much wider range of phenomena than the former,

and there is a tendency to think that in the last resort every

proper explanation of an occurrence or existence is of the latter

sort. Still, the idea that after all the existence of this whole

scheme of things, or of human life, may have a final cause which

explains it more fundamentally than does any efficient cause

remains an attractive speculation. Certainly, philosophers have

thought of final causes as somehow more basic than efficient

causes.

There do seem, however, to be rather plausible grounds for

insisting than an explanation by final causes is bound, on quite

a priori grounds, to be somehow secondary to explanation by

efficient causes, at least in the sense that there could be efficient

causes without final causes, but not vice versa.

For it may be suggested, first, that the basic sense of the

assertion that one thing X occurred for the sake of another Y,

is that some being possessed of forethought produced X, because,

wanting Y, he recognised or believed that X was a suitable means

to the production of Y. In that case, X can only occur for the

sake of Y if I) some such intelligent being knows about, or

believes in, some system of efficient causes (and we may note in

I49

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 150 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

passing that the notion of such a belief both occurring and being

wrong, not simply in detail, but in postulating such a system at

all, would be a strange one) and 2) the activity of such a being

is an efficient cause of X. (Such activity might consist merely in

willing).

The nature of the world we know could only be explained by

final causes in this sense of the phrase, if both the world and some

demiourgos belong to a universe governed by laws of efficient

causation and either itself without, or included in a vaster

system without, any such final cause whatever. Note especially

how impossible it is that the fundamental laws of efficient

causation operating in the universe as a whole should have a

final cause for being as they are. If some being were capable of

creating laws of nature by some fiat for the sake of some end

which they made possible, or for the sake, say, of their aesthetic

appeal, our "nature" would belong to a nature of which the

fundamental law of efficient causation would be that a desire

for X on that being's part produced X, and the holding of this

law would be, or would rest on, a law of efficient causation with-

out a final cause.

It is evident, then, that there could not be final causes in this

sense without efficient causes, while the converse does not hold.

But is this the only proper, or even the most important, sense of

"final cause"?

Perhaps not, but one may still incline to say the following.

X cannot occur for the sake of Y in any sense unless either X is

or tends to be an efficient cause of Y, or X is somehow connected

within a system of efficient causation to a belief that this is so.

Note that this still holds where the final cause of the existence

of an object is said to be something that it does, as with the heart

pumping blood or the eye seeing, for it is assumed that the

pumping action is the efficient cause of the circulation of the

blood, or that events in the eye are efficient causes of visual

consciousness. Thus explanations in terms of final causes always

refer, at least implicitly, to efficient causes, while presumably for

most senses of "final cause" the converse would not hold.

These are mere first impressions. I shall now consider various

alternative interpretations of the idea of one thing existing or

occurring for the sake of another, and see in what light they put

relations between efficient and final causes.

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 FINAL CAUSES 151

II

Our suggestion that final causes may presuppose, without being

presupposed by, efficient causes, did not imply that statements

about the former were either somehow reducible to, or might

with the advance of knowledge always be replaced by, statements

about the latter. However, the drift of modern thought has long

favoured one or other of these latter claims.

One reason for this seems to be the feeling that it is absurd to

explain an event in the present, even a human action, by

reference to an event in the future, said to be that for the sake

of which it occurs. The true explanation of events, including

human activities, must lie in prior events, it is felt, and it is only

some sort of illusion which pictures future events as somehow

pulling previous history towards them.

This response rather begs the question, for it amounts to the

complaint that final causes are not efficient causes. The notion

that the cause cannot succeed the effect applies only to efficient

causes. This is not even the most usual use of "cause" today in

ordinary speech, for the ordinary man, I suppose, uses the word

"cause" most often in such phrases as "the cause of world

brotherhood".

Why may not the efficient cause of an event succeed it ? Is this

merely a matter of definition ? May the distinction between final

and efficient causes simply be one between posterior and prior

causes ?

Such a view is too superficial. The idea that what makes a

thing happen, in the sort of way in which the striking of a match

makes a flame occur, could happen after it, is surely not objec-

tionable merely because it goes against an easily changed verbal

convention. On the other hand, it will not do to say that the

future cannot make things happen because it does not exist, for

the belief that the future is somehow less real than the past, or

for that matter than the present, seems to me totally mistaken.

A more fundamental explanation is that the before-after relation

is definable in terms of the concept of one event making another

happen rather than vice versa.

There is, however, a less controversial way of grounding a

feeling that final causation conceived as a later event making an

earlier event happen is fishy, namely pointing out that the final

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 152 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

cause of an event need not have existence in the future. For

instance, the final cause of Sir Alec Douglas-Home's resignation

as leader of the Conservativts may have been the hoped for

Conservative victory at the next election.

To stay this puzzlement some philosophers (e.g., Bentham)

have reduced final causation in human behaviour to efficient

causation by saying that for X to occur for the sake of Y is for X

to have been efficiently caused either directly by a desire for Y,

or by a desire for X itself efficiently caused by a desire for Y. This

is one possible interpretation of the analysis of final causation

sketched in section I.

Against it, it has been argued that, even if there sometimes

occur states of consciousness such as desirings, aspirings, or

willings of future events (which is sometimes denied) the fact of

an activity being directed towards a certain goal can be ascer-

tained without ascertaining the occurrence of any such events,

and that therefore such events are not required for purposive-

ness. Another argument claims that causation of an event by a

mental act which intends it, goes against the external nature of

the (efficient) causal relation. But the existence of the one is logi-

cally independent of the existence of the other and this is all the

externality required. The most serious objection is that an

organism's movements might be efficiently caused by a desire

without being inspired by it, so that philosophers taking this view

must be asked to specify a special type of efficient causation as

that which is in question. But rather than discuss the peculiar

difficulties of this theory I shall consider objections to the more

general thesis of I, that to explain by final causes is to invoke an

agent who has plans.

III

Is it possible that a thing should exist for the sake of something

without having been deliberately brought into existence as a

means to it ?

The Darwinian explanation of the fitness of organisms for their

environment in terms of natural selection on a basis of mutations

occurring in some way not explained within the theory was

certainly one of the main death blows to the teleological

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 FINAL CAUSES 153

explanations advanced in support of theism by such as William

Paley, but it is also true that Darwinism leaves a placeof a sortfor

explanation in terms of final causes. One may frame an answer

to a question as to what the survival value of some organ is by

saying that its purpose or function is such and such, or that it

exists for the sake of such and such. Teleological (or "functional")

explanation in the social sciences may be of this sort. One might

ask: "What do prisons exist for the sake of?" and get an answer

which really points out some survival value of these institutions.

Confusion between this and other ways of taking such questions

is sometimes harmful.

If statements saying that one thing exists for the sake of another

thing or for the sake of something which it does, may be inter-

preted thus, then there is no doubt that some room for teleologi-

cal explanation remains, even when there is no question of the

thing explained being part of someone's conscious plan. Such

final causes do not offer a rival explanation to one in terms of

efficient causation, and are really reducible to the existence of

efficient causes for a thing coming into existence and remaining

in existence (e.g., via the mechanism of heredity) and a lack of

efficient causes for its going out of existence.

IV

Is there any other sense in which it may be true that something

exists for the sake of its effects or its doings, without having been

created as a means to these effects or doings by a being possessed

of forethought ?

Well, certainly it has sometimes been felt that there is some

end towards which the universe as a whole, or certain elements

in it, are somehow reaching out, without their having been

created as a means to this end. Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw,

and possibly Bergson, thought of life or the life force as reaching

towards some end which it had not been created as a means

towards, and of which it did not itself possess forethought, and

thought that evolutionary changes occurred for the sake of this

end in a way not explicable along Darwinian lines. Moreover,

people sometimes ask vague questions, such as "What is life for ?"

"What is the purpose of suffering ?", "Why are deformed babies

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 154 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

born ?"which seem to be as to what these things occur for the

sake of, and which are not always taken as answerable only along

such lines as we have so far considered. Other more fortunate

people sometimes experience, or think that they experience,

some sort of reality which they suppose to be that for the sake

of which life or the world exists.

Maybe such people are asking questions or making assertions

which really only make sense against theistic presuppositions as

to a world designed by a creator with an end in view, but which

they continue to repeat like emotional parrots even when these

presuppositions are abandoned. As I would always prefer to

find sense than nonsense I shall suggest another possible inter-

pretation of these questions later.

The views of Shaw, Butler, and Bergson are of a rather

different kind. The model which they have in mind is that of

a human being who is vaguely and incoherently searching for

something he cannot say quite what. In some cases the object

of such a search is found, as perhaps in the discovery of a life's

vocation. Teleological explanations of this kind of the develop-

ment of new species, or of the development of the whole world,

compare life or the universe to such a human being. In doing

so, they both insist on a kind of teleology, most obviously

present in human action, which is not allowed for in the analyses

discussed above in sections I and II, and extend its application

to individuals which are primafacie very different in status from

human beings. Whether this extension is correct or not is a

factual question. That they are right on the conceptual point

can be seen quite well in connection with human teleology.

It is certainly often true that that for the sake of which my

doings occur is that which I have deliberately produced them

as a means towards. If I write a letter applying for a job, the

letter itself has been brought into existence after having been

envisaged as a means to my having the job. Still, the actual

movements of my hand in writing are purposive, having as

their immediate goal the leaving of certain definite marks on

the paper and as their remoter goal again the getting of the

job, and it seems quite wrong to suggest that they were

deliberately produced in the recognition that they would have

this result. The very notion of an active being whose every

purposive activity is deliberately selected as a means to its goal

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 FINAL CAUSES 155

seems incoherent. (Surely this is not because there can be

purposive activity without a goal. Purposive activity which is

not for the sake of something beyond it, occurs for the sake of

itself exemplifying some universal.) Thinking itself, for one

thing, is a kind of purposive activity, and some of the thinking

which deliberately selects a goal must itself have a goal not

previously thought out. This suggests that the view of final

causation mentioned in section I, and still more that mentioned

in II, is somewhat inadequate, which is not to say that the

insistence that final causation (apart from the Darwinian type)

demands a purposive agent whose activities function as efficient

causes of the occurrences explained by final causation, does

not still stand.

Dissatisfied, partly for such reasons as I have mentioned, with

the account of final causation mentioned in I, and still more

with that mentioned in II, various contemporary philosophers,

in particular C. Taylor in his The Explanation of Behaviour, have

suggested that to explain a stretch of some object's activity as

occurring for the sake of a goal, is to exhibit it as an instance

of a general tendency on the part of that object to do whatever

is required in any situation, at least within some very wide

range of situations, to bring about a certain state of affairs (or

at least to maximise the chances of its coming about) in the

most 'economical' (however that be defined) way, and subject

perhaps to certain restrictions on the means employed. One

thereby explains an individual occurrence as an instance of

some general truth (perhaps applying only to one individual,

more probably applying to all of a certain description) and

one gives grounds for prediction as to how the activity will

proceed under various possible circumstances.

It would seem that on such a view one can ascribe a goal to

an object without ascribing any sort of consciousness to it,

whether volitional or otherwise. Even if implications regarding

consciousness are implicit in our ordinary ascriptions of pur-

poses to each other, it is a virtue of this view to have isolated

from these ordinary ascriptions, a component concept of a

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 156 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

more or less behaviourist kind (though Taylor does not think

of it as such) which is intelligible on its own.

On the face of it, it would seem that various mechanisms to

which consciousness is not ordinarily ascribed, do have goals

in his sense, for the sake of which their activities occur. The

movements of an artefact such as a homing rocket, for instance,

can be said to occur for the sake of its reaching its moving

target, and this in a sense which does not depend upon its

having been designed by some other agent who had this goal.

Thus the homing rocket would have had this goal once

launched, even if its existence, and perhaps its launching, had

come about in some utterly different manner.

Recognition of the possibilities implicit in mechanistic feed-

back systems has encouraged the suspicion that all human

behaviour which is described as having goals is explicable in

this way. It seems a mistake to present this as the possibility

that human behaviour does not really have goals, which it

certainly does on the definition just mentioned. We should say

rather that the behaviour which at one level is explained and

predicted in terms of its goals, may also, at a more fundamental

level, be explicable and predictable in terms of efficient causes.

Taylor, however, insists that an individual's activities are

not goal-directed in the proper sense unless an explanation of

the kind I have indicated above is the fundamental explanation

of its activities, fundamental in the sense that the general truth

in question about that object, or about objects of its type, is

not deducible from an account of its, or their, structure

together with laws of efficient causation.

This restriction, though some of its motives may be under-

standable, is rather bizarre. The observable fact that human

behaviour is goal-directed in the sense indicated, would not be

conjured out of existence, or shown to be an illusion, by its

being discovered that it could be explained in terms of efficient

causes. The possibility or probability that there is a complete

efficient causal explanation of Mr. Nixon's verbal and other

activities scarcely throws in doubt my belief that over a long

period much of his activity had as its final cause the gaining of

the Presidency.

It has, indeed, been urged that no such possibility exists,

and that there can be no efficient causal explanations of human

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 FINAL CAUSES 157

actions, on the ground that the concepts of the various recog-

nized types of human actions either could not, or obviously will

not, figure in the causal laws propounded by scientists in

explaining human movements. However, many of the movements

which I notice in nature or in art (the roughness of the sea,

the weather, or the movements of the hands on a clock) are

classified by me in ways of a non-scientific sort, but I do not

conclude that they are without causal explanation. Some of the

properties used in this classification are doubtless epipheno-

menal with reference to the properties mentioned in physics

(and perhaps in other natural sciences) and thus, not being

logically connected with more typically "scientific" properties,

they must be contingently connected by laws which mention

them or their logical associates,-but others of them are such

that their occurrence is entailed by the co-occurrence of

properties mentioned in scientific laws, though they are not

mentioned there themselves. Action-concepts (which, after all,

are used for classifying particulars which are movements, even

if not qua movements) may cover both types of property, but

I see no need to regard them as referring to some third type of

property, which cannot have its occurrence explained in terms

of efficient causation.

It seems, then, that a goal can be ascribed to Mr. Nixon and

reference to it serve to explain his behaviour, in the sense that

one explains individual items as having occurred because they

were just what was required to make it most likely, in the

simplest way and subject to certain restrictions, that Mr.

Nixon would end up as President, while leaving it open whether

this tendency to do what is likely to have this result, is grounded

in efficient causes or not. The type of reference made here to the

goal object or situation explains why it can thus figure as a

final cause without actually being a real event in the future-

as in the case of a similar explanation of Mr. Nixon's conduct

eight years earlier, for instance.

Perhaps the Shavian view that the evolutionary process is

striving towards some fairly definite goal is, likewise, not in-

compatible with its having a (not purely Darwinian) mecha-

nistic explanation.

VI

Taylor's thesis, and my discussion of it, relies on a sharp

6*

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 158 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

contrast between teleological laws (general truths of the kind

indicated above) and (efficient) causal laws, the difference

between us being as to whether the former cease to be genuinely

explanatory when shown to be derivative from the latter.

Regarding this sharp contrast I have my doubts, my airing of

which in this section will constitute something of a digression.

Is the distinction between a teleological law and efficient

causal law perhaps just a difference in the way in which a

certain recurrent pattern in the world is described, certain

descriptions expressing an interest in how processes arise or

can be made to do so, while other descriptions express rather a

dramatic interest in the upshot of such processes ?

Might one perhaps say of any system of material things

governed by certain efficient causal laws that it will always do

what is required in order that it shall be in a state in which the

relations between its parts, and itself and its environment, shall

be such as the causal laws describe as holding? For instance,

the goal of the solar system may be regarded as the preservation

of certain relations between its elements, and between itself

and the rest of the universe. Or, in particular situations one may

always call the goal of a system that to which it will move if

the environment does not alter too much. The appropriateness

of talking of such a state as its goal will depend on the range of

different environmental circumstances in which it will still

move towards it, and will thus be a matter of degree.

May one perhaps make a complementary transformation of

any apparently radically teleological law governing biological

systems into a sort of causal law itself, even if it should turn out

not to be derivable from any more fundamental physical laws ?

Suppose that there is a certain organism, the behaviour of

which is continually adjusted in the way required to preserve

a certain relation between its parts, and between it and its

environment, and suppose that these relations are not of a type

which figures in laws governing other sorts of material object.

Suppose further that they cannot be seen as a special con-

sequence in special circumstances of material laws of universal

application. We have still (so it may be suggested) not come

across a law of a radically different kind from those more

widely applicable laws. It is simply an extra law in the universe

that organisms of that type do (at least under a wide range of

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 FINAL CAUSES 159

circumstances) whatever is required to keep their parts in

certain relations to each other and to the environment. To

explain something as a mechanism is, essentially, to exhibit its

activities as instances of some general laws describing the habits

of matter. This essence of mechanistic explanation is still

present if the laws to which appeal is made describe a special

set of habits which matter always adopts when the operation

of other laws has got it into a certain state, such as could not

be anticipated on the basis of matter's habits prior to being

thus organized.

Taylor claims that teleological laws differ from causal laws

in the following respect. The causal law says that when things

of a certain kind are in a situation of a certain definite kind,

they will exhibit developments of a certain definite kind. The

teleological law says that when things of a certain kind are in

any situation (falling within a certain range, one should surely

add) they will exhibit developments of whatever kind are

requisite in that situation to keep them in or bring them into a

certain state (or perhaps one should add: which are required if

this is to be achieved with maximum economy and subject to

certain further limitations) which state, in virtue of this law,

can be called their goal .

Incidentally, Taylor often writes as though these laws con-

cerned simply particular individuals, rather than all individuals

of a certain kind, but unless they apply to individuals as being

of a certain kind (e.g., of a certain internal structure) they can

hardly be called laws. This, however, doesn't much effect present

issues. If there were certain quasi-laws applying to certain

nameable individuals rather than to all individuals of a certain

kind, the question whether they were teleological quasi-laws

or efficient causal quasi-laws would still arise.

To explain particular developments in things by laws of

either of these sorts will be to show them as instances of what

things of a certain kind always do in situations of a certain

kind, but if one appeals to a teleological law one will be classi-

fying the particular situation not in terms of its own 'intrinsic'

character but as one in which those developments are required

if those things are going to continue in or move towards a

certain state, while if one appeals to a causal law one will

classify the particular situation and likewise the developments

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 I60 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

in a more 'intrinsic' way which makes no reference to the

serviceableness of those developments for keeping the things in,

or moving towards, a certain state. One might think that one

could always replace a teleological explanation simply by

classifying the situation and developments on some more

'intrinsic' basis. However, Taylor's view seems to be that such

a replacement will never work in the properly teleological case,

for the correlation between situations answering to that more

intrinsic specification and developments of the kind being

explained will not hold in all cases, but only in such cases as

the being in such a situation makes developments of that kind

requisite if the things are going to keep in or move towards

that state. But in saying this, I don't think that Taylor quite

appreciates that the situation must fall under some more

'intrinsic' description such that whenever things of that sort

are in it, developments of that sort are required if they are to

remain in or move towards that state. One can only talk of

the situation making those developments requisite for that

state to be preserved or reached, if there are causal laws

applicable to the whole state of affairs in virtue of some

'intrinsic' description of it which determines that by those

developments and only by those developments will the state

in question be preserved or reached (or if the formulation is

qualified as above, that it will be preserved or reached in the

most economical way by those developments). It must then

be true that whenever that 'intrinsic' description applies, the

object will do that thing, and this seems to constitute a law of

efficient causation.

Taylor might still claim that the teleological law has a

special status in cases of genuine teleology in the sense that,

though in all specific cases one could substitute a causal law

of this kind, one would arrive thereby at sundry disconnected

causal laws which could not be subsumed under any common

principle other than one of a teleological kind, namely a law

to the effect that things of that kind will develop in all situa-

tions, or in all situations within some range, in the way required

if they are to remain in or move towards such a state. Well, the

first thing to note is that if there are a finite number of causal

laws sufficient for determining what in any causally possible

situation is required if they are to remain in or move towards

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 FINAL CAUSES 161

that state, then it will be possible (in virtue of the finite formula

for the ways in which that goal state may be, so to speak,

preserved or tended towards) to produce a finite set of laws

the conjunction of which will do the same job as the teleological

law, while if there are an infinite number of such laws (not all

derivable from some finite conjunction of laws) there will still

in some sense be an infinite conjunction of such laws which

would do the same job as the teleological laws. In either case,

Taylor's claim that the teleological law is basic and not

derivable from causal laws will fail, but he may make the

rather weaker claim that if the things in question are genuinely

teleological systems, this finite or infinite conjunction of such

laws will be subsumable under a common principle only by

appealing to the teleological law. In such a case, especially

where the causal laws are not all derivable from some finite

conjunction of laws of efficient causation, one might well say

that the teleological law offered a more fundamental explana-

tion than any of the causal laws.

But what is it about such ultimately teleological laws, laws

which though equivalent to, still offer a unifying principle for,

a finite, or just possibly infinite conjunction of independent

causal laws, which marks them off as teleological? For do not

basic causal laws in effect say that in any situation, things of a

certain kind, or perhaps material things in general, will do

whatever is required in order that they remain in certain

relations one to another, or in order that they continue to

move in a certain direction of change ?

Someone might try to defend Taylor's distinction between

causal and teleological laws by suggesting that the word

"required" really has a different force in each case. When it is

said that the solar system will always do what is required in

order to preserve certain relationships in being that fact that

what the solar system does (as it might be specified at some

particular junction) is that which is required to preserve these

relations is a logical truth. The only relevant description of

what it does, entails or is equivalent to the statement that it

preserves these relationships in being. On the other hand,

when an organism such as Taylor might consider genuinely

teleological does what is required to preserve certain relation-

ships in being, that what it does (as this might be specified at

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 162 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

some particular juncture) is that which is required is probably

not a logical truth. Rather, it is what is required, granted

certain basic laws of matter, granted, that is, something con-

tingent. In other words, the basic laws of matter determine

what it is that is required as a matter of contingent fact in order

that the organism shall remain in or move towards a certain

state. They cannot, in the same way, be said to determine what

is required, as a matter of contingent fact, in order that

material things shall stay in the mutual relations they them-

selves describe.

This difference is apparent rather than real, however. For

if one says that the aim of the organism is that, while preserving

those relations between its parts, and between itself and its

environment, which the so called basic laws of matter specify,

it should at the same time sustain certain other states or rela-

tions in being, or move towards a certain state or set of

relationships, then the aims of the organism become aims in a

sense no different from that in which the material world as a

whole has the aims specified by the basic laws of matter. For

now, that what it does (as it might be specified at some par-

ticular juncture) is what is required if its aims are to be

fulfilled, comes out as a logical truth. The sole difference is

that while what Taylor might think of as the non-teleological

parts of the world, are dedicated to keeping one limited set of

relations in being, what he might think of as the teleological

parts of the world are dedicated to this and dedicated also to

preserving certain other relations in being at the same time as

the basic ones. The most that Taylor could claim for his

teleological parts of the world is that their dedication to this

second aim is not deducible from their dedication to the first

aim. He would also have to hold that their dedication to the

first aim allowed of a certain latitude in behaviour, and thus

that the ordinary physical laws of nature do not determine

every detail of what happens, which is left for determination

by their dedication to the second aim. This latitude could either

be peculiar to the so-called teleological systems, or common to

all material things. If the latter, and if no other pattern settled

the issue between the alternatives which the 'basic' laws left

open, a humorist might say that the non-teleological parts of

nature were alone free, since they alone would not be bound

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 FINAL CAUSES 163

by the dedication to secondary aims to come down one definite

way where the primary aims of matter left some latitude. If

the first, then the dedication to the primary aims of matter

would partially lapse in the case of the so-called teleological

systems. One could not take it as wholly lapsing, since it is only

in virtue of their allegiance to the primary aims that one can

think of what they do as required for obtaining their secondary

aims.

These considerations rather suggest that a teleological

explanation of the kind under discussion and a mechanistic

one are not at bottom of different types, such divergence as

there seems to be lying rather in whether one's interest in a

particular case is in the drama of results or in the mechanics

of transformation. Events make each other happen conformably

with certain time spanning patterns such that when one begins

there is a good chance of its completing itself, and there is a

certain dedication, as one may put it, on the part of the

matter which has displayed the beginning of the pattern to

seeing the pattern completed. It does not make much difference

whether this dedication is or is not derivative from the basic

dedication of all matter to the preservation of certain relations

between its parts. That is, it does not make the sort of difference

as to how one should regard the basic fates and duties of men,

which it is thought to make by those who look upon mechan-

istic explanations as threatening the dignity or freedom of

man; for purposes of specific social and medical policies it

may make a great difference.

There is doubtless some difference between a law which says

that when matter is organized in a certain way it will, subject

to sticking to certain basic laws of matter, also do whatever is

required, logically, for keeping certain relations in being, e.g.,

to keeping certain variables constant functions of certain other

variables, and saying that it will, subject to these same

restrictions, do whatever is required in order that the matter

thus organized should pass into some new state or set of relation-

ships. However, the latter law, though it is developmental

rather than simply functional, is still in a sense quite mechan-

istic (and certainly no less deterministic than a functional law)

for it simply tells one that a given type of situation will pass

into a given other type of situation and thus conforms to the

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 164 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

simplest "A follows B" model of a causal law. The law that a

lion will do whatever is required (subject to certain limitations)

in order to kill an antelope which it sees, if thought to be a

basic law, would say that Lion seeing antelope is (within a certain

range of circumstances) regularly followed by Lion killing

antelope in the most economical manner conformable to more

basic laws of nature. Similarly with developmental laws

regarding society which simply say that one social system

will be followed by another social system. Thus if some develop-

mental laws are not derivative from efficient functional causal

laws on the principle of negative feedback they seem to come

out themselves simply as rather odd laws of the simplest efficient

causal type.

Incidentally, Taylor might have done better to have his

teleological laws say that a system will do whatever is required

to maximise the chances of a particular result, than simply what

is required to bring about the result. Assimilability of the two

types of law might then be more problematic, though I suspect

that one could still regard a teleological law as a special sort

of causal tendency law.

VII

I have ignored so far a complication which must be brought

into the account of teleology described in section V, if it is to

constitute a plausible account of human, or even animal

purposiveness. Taylor distinguishes two types of teleological

laws. The first tells us that an object will do whatever is required

to bring about a certain result, describable as a goal. The

second tells us that an object will do whatever is required, as it

seems to the agent, to bring about a certain result, describable

as its goal. (It seems desirable to add in each case: "or at least

maximise the chances of its being brought about.") The latter

is distinguished as an intentional teleological law. I shall call

goals of the first type controlling goals, those of the latter type

intended goals.

It seems probable that the analysis of X occurring for the

sake of Y which was mentioned in section I could be taken in

such a way as to be reducible to statements about behaviour

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 FINAL CAUSES 165

governed by intentional teleological laws. Some, but not all,

purposive behaviour of the unplanned kind discussed in section

IV would seem to be governed by non-intentional teleological

laws. It is to be noticed that if the intentional law introduces a

reference to consciousness (and it is not necessary to construe

it as doing so) it is, rather oddly, to consciousness of a purely

cognitive kind. No volitional consciousness is required by

Taylor's formula.

It may at first look as though the relation between teleo-

logical and causal laws is bound to be radically different accord-

ing as to whether the former are intentional or not, If, however,

intentional teleological laws are in fact only a special case of

non-intentional ones this will not be so. I suspect that inten-

tional teleological laws can be reformulated as non-intentional

teleological laws in which the controlling goal is a certain

belief-state of the individual.

It may be objected that, if for X to be my intended goal is

for me to be doing what is required to make me believe (or be

nearer believing than I would otherwise be) that I am pro-

ducing X, then my having this goal might manifest itself in

some such way as my getting myself hypnotised into this

belief. But if I did this, it may be said, I would show that

achieving X was not my real goal. This objection can be met

along some such lines as that of saying that my intended goal

is X provided only that my controlling goal is believing that

I am going to produce X by methods which do not involve

passing through a belief that I am going to end up with a false

belief that I am going to produce X. (Some more complicated

formulation may be required to get round some even more

tortuous objections of the same general kind.)

It should be noticed, perhaps, that while the intended goal

might either be a state of affairs lying in the future or the con-

tinuous sustaining of some state of affairs over a period, the

controlling goal would seem bound to be of the latter kind.

It may be asked why the intended goal is thought of as more

aptly described as that for the sake of which activity occurs,

than is the controlling goal, namely the state of believing that

the intended goal will be reached. For an interesting suggestion

bearing on this point, I refer the reader to D. M. Armstrong's

A Materialist Theory of the Mind (pp. 263-4).

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 166 TIMOTHY L. S,. SPRIGGE

But what is a belief? I suggest that the sense of the word

"belief" which is likely to be most useful in the present context

is one in which to ascribe a belief to someone is, in effect, to

claim that it is just as if the fact believed in were represented

on a map, states of which are controlling goals of the organism,

and which represents the organism's environment (and the

organism itself) with substantial correctness according to a

certain projection. It is much more likely than not that there

really are such maps thus connected with the beings who are

said to have beliefs, but if there are not, they would have to be

regarded as theoretical fictions. The sensible and intelligible

patterns immediately given to consciousness are very much as

though they were fragments of such a map, but it seems that

there is no actually existing map containing them, and I do

not know of what other elements such a map might be com-

posed but the physical constituents of the brain.

If the belief that a certain situation holds can be correlated

with, or identified with, some pattern in the brain which

represents the state of affairs believed in, then the preservation

of this pattern in the brain map may be regarded as the

controlling goal of the behaviour having the state of affairs

thus represented as its intended goal. Behaviour may then be

explained by reference to the intended goal, considered as a

final cause, without prejudice to more fundamental efficient

causal explanations which may underlie the tendency of the

organism to do what is required to preserve that pattern in

the brain.

I conclude that in so far as the ascription of goals to indi-

viduals is a matter of bringing their activities under teleological

laws, whether intentional or otherwise, then the having of goals

is compatible with being a mechanism and compatible with

being non-conscious.

VIII

Still, whether human beings are mechanisms or not, they are

conscious, and one form which consciousness takes in them is

that of a conscious desiring or willing of envisaged future

situations, a recognition of them as good, or of a conscious

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 FINAL CAUSES 167

aversion to certain possible situations envisaged in the future

and a recognition of them as evil. Surely some mention of these

forms of consciousness is required in a discussion of teleology?

Of course it is. Purpose without consciousness would certainly

be Hamlet without the Prince.

In the present state of philosophy, it is possible that I may

be challenged to say what I mean by "consciousness". I shall

offer a hint as to the meaning of the expression, without

thinking it incumbent upon me to establish (for anyone absurd

enough to doubt it) that there actually are such phases of

existence.

One is wondering about the consciousness which an object

possesses whenever one wonders what it must be like being that

object. Concerning an object deemed non-conscious one cannot

thus wonder. To wonder what it is like being an object is to

concern oneself with a question different from any scientific or

practical question about the observable properties or behaviour

of that object or about the mechanisms which underlie such

properties or behaviour. A behaviouristically or physicalistic-

ally minded psychologist might be very good at knowing what

a psychopath was like, without having any idea what it was

like being a psychopath.

One may find it very difficult to imagine what it must be

like to be another human being. (Let us not confuse this with

the meaningless attempt to imagine oneself being another

human being.) Moreover, when one does think oneself capable

of doing so, one is probably more often than not imagining that

other person's consciousness, at least in part, incorrectly.

Actually, there are also great difficulties in imagining what it

is like being oneself. One cannot think about one's present

conscious state (which is always the envisaging of something

other than itself) and one can only rely on memory with

regard to one's past conscious states. However, in reading a

good novel one does imagine quite vividly what it would be

like to be (not, I repeat, for oneself to be) a person of a certain

kind in circumstances of a certain kind both fairly remote from

one's own. If the novel represents a type which actually exists,

one gains thereby some insight into the consciousness of certain

other types of being. One is always likely to be wrong in

particular cases, but one may be right in supposing that the

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 168 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

moments of consciousness which one imagines are what people

do sometimes live through. Moreover, there is no reason to

suppose that one is always grossly wrong in particular cases.

When one imagines another's conscious state, there is no

conclusive way of checking up whether one has done so correctly

or not. This by no means implies that one's guess may not in

fact be more or less correct. Presuming that the object (that is,

at least normally, the organism) with which one is concerned,

is indeed conscious, then being that organism will have a certain

definite complex quality at every walking moment, and what

one imagines will (if one is right) be, in fact, a more or less

correct reproduction, or (alternatively) symbolic representa-

tion, of that complex quality. Physical science makes no

reference to qualities of this kind.

Thus consciousness is that which one characterises when one

tries to answer the question what it is or might be like to be a

certain object in a certain situation. This use of "be" (which I

have no time to discuss further) though suggestive, is most

peculiar, for it is not the same thing to characterise the con-

sciousness of an organism and to characterise that organism.

An inanimate (or rather, a non-conscious) object has a definite

character at every moment and is plenty of things, but there

is nothing which is being that object in the relevant sense.

It is not impossible to use words to designate some of the

more generic characteristics of moments of consciousness, and

many moments of consciousness come under the heading of

being envisagements of future situations as good or desirable.

Mr. Nixon, one may be sure, lived through many such moments

of consciousness on election night 1968 in which future possible

events such as his making the President's inaugural speech

flashed upon his consciousness as infinitely good and desirable.

A sense of final causation was mentioned in section II which

introduced these forms of consciousness as causes. Yet it seems

incongruous to regard consciousness or awareness as a causal

agent in that world of which it is an awareness. Certainly an

organism's consciousness of things is typically of them as good

or evil, and this reflects the direction of the organism's activity

towards or away from them. (In the absence of such reflection

that consciousness, even if caused by the brain states of that

organism, would not be that organism's consciousness, but

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 FINAL CAUSES 169

rather a demonic spirit attached to it.) This is not to say that

this awareness of a thing as good can itself contribute to bring-

ing that thing about. It seems more likely that such human

behaviour as has intended goals in the sense described in the

last section has efficient causes which evoke a conscious

envisagement of those goal states as good, or if the goals are

avoidances, of the situations avoided as evil.

This suggests a sense of "for the sake of" in which an activity

does not occur for the sake of some result unless not only is

that result its intended goal in the sense of section VII, but the

activity was also associated with a conscious envisagement of

it as good (or if it is an avoidance, of that of which it is an

avoidance as evil). If that result is envisaged as good partly or

wholly for its leading on to something else, and if the belief

that it would thus lead on (in the sense of belief specified in

section VII) is an efficient cause of its being an intended goal,

then it also occurred for the sake of that something else, in an

associated meaning of the phrase. The movements of homing

rockets occur for the sake of the destruction of a plane in the

latter but not the former sense.

We have here, finally, what are surely the most important

senses of "final cause", for the question how far events in the

universe have final causes in one or other of these senses, is the

question how far the occurrence of consciousness of things as

being good or evil is a likely predictor of their occurrence. The

greater number of events which have such final causes the

better the universe is likely to be (except indeed where, as so

often happens, their tendencies conflict) for surely the universe

is good in so far forth as it satisfies the conscious yearnings in it.

To learn that the range of events which have such final causes

is very limited is to learn depressing, though doubtless truthful,

news; but the claim that an event has this sort of final cause is

not to be equated either with any claim that it did not have

efficient causes or that moments of consciousness were among

its efficient causes.

It is a mistake to think that the human situation is somehow

better if our sense of things as good or evil has causal efficacy.

This mistake depends on a confusion between efficacy and

fulfilment. The conscious envisagement of X as evil might just

as well have been the efficient cause of X as the envisagement

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 I70 TIMOTHY L. S. SPRIGGE

of it as good; one could not say in the former case that

it occurred for the sake of X, so that there is no equivalence

between the view that consciousness is efficacious and the view

that conscious desires tend to be fulfilled.

To ask what a thing exists for the sake of in this present

sense is to make the optimistic assumption that it tends to

produce what is good, at least in the sight of some consciousness

concerned with it. Now I remarked in section IV that people

sometimes ask what something (such as life or suffering) exists

for the sake of, even when they have dropped any idea that it is

brought about by the goal-directed activity of some agent. I

suggest that the question here has a sense derivative from the

one we have been considering, and amounts to this: "Granted

that its tendency to produce something envisaged as good may

have had nothing to do with its coming into existence, since

it does exist, and we must put up with it somehow, surely it

tends to produce something, or itself has some character,

which we can envisage as good-but what ?" In short, to ask

what a thing exists for the sake of is here the same as to ask

what it is good for. A satisfying answer is like an explanation

for the thing's existence inasmuch as it stops us worrying

about it.

If, at one level, the fact that a human or other animal pursues

certain goals is a physical fact about a physical thing, one can

now point out that in the sense of "final cause" just explained,

the final cause of such physical facts is something on a quite

different plane, namely the union of consciousness with a felt

good. Thus not only is consciousness (something quite im-

material in its nature) necessary, as we mentioned before, to

convert a system which is intentional and teleological in the

kind of way with which a physicalist can deal into a genuinely

purposive being, but also, when it reaches certain heights, it is

the sole justification which we can find for a world in which

such physical, and perhaps mechanistic, systems have

developed.1

REFERENCE

1 Many of the ideas advanced in this paper, derive from George

Santayana. See especially, Reason in Common Sense, Chaps. VIII-XI; The

Realm of Matter, Chaps. VI-VIII; The Realm of Spirit, Chaps. IV and VI;

Animal Faith and Spiritual Life (ed. J. Lachs) Section IV.

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 FINAL CAUSES

by Timothy L. S. Sprigge

and Alan Montefiore

II Alan Montefiore

The central part of Mr. Sprigge's paper is given to a discussion

of Charles Taylor's views on the nature of teleological explana-

tion. My contribution to this symposium records an attempt

to make up my own mind on the main issues between them. I

have also tried to take some account of the views of Denis

Noble2 and Robert Borger3, both of whom use arguments that

for some distance at least run parallel to certain arguments

used by Sprigge and to both of whom Taylor has himself

replied in print.4 Partly in the interests of brevity and partly

because I have to admit that my own technical competence is

often stretched to, and sometimes beyond, its limits in some

aspects of these matters, my own account will be presented in

no doubt dangerously over-simplified terms.

It is worth beginning by trying simply to get straight the

present state of these arguments as to whether there really is

any substantial difference between a teleological explanation

and one in terms of efficient causation, when both are somehow

interpreted, as they appear to have been throughout most of

this controversy, in terms of their associated Humean regulari-

ties. Sprigge puts this question as follows: "Is the distinction

between a teleological law and an efficient causal law perhaps

just a difference in the way in which a certain recurrent pattern

in the world is described, certain descriptions expressing a

greater interest in beginnings ... while other descriptions express

an interest rather in results ?" Or to quote Noble in his Analysis

article of January 1967: "Whenever a teleological explanation

of the kind described by Taylor can be given, it is necessarily the

case that a non-teleological account can also be given."

Borger's version of this point comes out rather differently in as

much as he argues that "explanations in terms of purpose and

mechanistic explanations are not rivals, provided they are

171

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 172 ALAN MONTEFIORE

considered in the context of two different types of enquiry" ;

but he does also maintain that "when we are listing the pro-

perties of a substance (or situation) S, rather than singling out

one of them in the context of some explanation, it makes no

difference as far as the claims about the nature of S are con-

cerned, whether we say of S 'it requires B to turn it into G'

or 'S has the property of being turned into G by B'. All the

potentially unlimited number of sequences of events, in which

S can be an element, provide the basis for possible descriptions

of it, and these could be expressed in equivalent intrinsic or

teleological forms".'

The core of these arguments-Sprigge's and Noble's at any

rate-seems to lie in the fact that if reference to an end-state

or goal G is to serve as an explanation of why a system in

state SE should emit behaviour B, there must exist relation-

ships of regular sequence between SE, B and G such as would

entitle us to predict (if, indeed, Humean regularities ever entitle

one to predict) that every time the system and its environment

are in the requisite state, the behaviour in question will follow

to be followed in turn by arrival at the goal.

Taylor, of course, fully recognises this fact-see, for example,

his reply to Noble in Analysis, Mar. 1967. He then goes on in

effect to make much the sort of claim that Sprigge suggests

that he "might still" make, namely, to quote Sprigge, "that

though in all specific cases one could substitute a causal law

of this kind, one would arrive thereby at sundry disconnected

causal laws which could not be subsumed under any common

principle other than one of a teleological kind . . . ". More

precisely, Taylor maintains that it must remain an empirical

question whether or not one could arrive at any general

principle of efficient causation which would serve to link all

the otherwise "sundry disconnected causal laws". There seems

to be no reason why he should be particularly impressed by,

though he would doubtless acknowledge, the further fact that

it may always be possible to produce some sort of finite or

infinite conjunction under which to subsume any finite or

infinite collection of such otherwise disconnected causal regu-

larities; nor by Sprigge's contention that his claim that teleo-

logical laws may be-not, incidentally, 'are'-basic for certain

ranges of phenomena, and not derivable from laws of efficient

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 FINAL CAUSES 173

causation, must fail on this account. In fact, the claim that he

is actually interested in making amounts to all intents and

purposes to "the rather weaker claim" that Sprigge suggests

that he might make: "that", in Sprigge's words, "if the things

in question are genuinely teleological systems, this finite or

infinite conjunction of such laws will be subsumable under a

common principle only by appealing to the teleological law."

As Sprigge immediately comments, "in such a case, especially

where the causal laws are not all derivable from some finite

conjunction of laws of efficient causation, one might well say

that the teleological law offered a more fundamental explana-

tion than any of the causal laws."

This, surely, is just what Taylor would want to say-backing

up this claim by reference to the crucial importance of the

possibilities of further extrapolation and prediction that any

'useful' law must offer. To quote from his Analysis reply to

Noble: "Suppose it be the case that the set of correlations

(SE) I --(B) I,(SE)2-+(B)2 ... (SE)n-+(B)n exhibit no intrinsic

order, so that they leave us just as incapable of predicting

what will happen in situation (SE)n + I as we would have

been before establishing this set of correlations; suppose in

other words it be the case that these correlations are not

instances of a general non-teleological law, B = f (SE); then we

would clearly have a teleological account without a correspond-

ing non-teleological one. For the correlations (T) I-+(B) I . . .

(T)n-+-(B)n do permit extrapolation to new cases ... ."

Both Sprigge and Noble, however, go on to present further

arguments against this, the so-called weaker claim. The central

argument of Noble's reply to Taylor in their Analysis contro-

versy (Dec. 1967) is not, as it stands, altogether clear to me,

but may, I think, be construed as a stronger version of Sprigge's

"finite or infinite conjunction" argument. We know that for

any set of correlations, "provided that the correlations are

regular, there must be some order to which the correlations

conform." This means that for any set of n correlations there

must be some order to which, along with this set, all its own

sub-sets must necessarily at the same time conform. But if to

any order to which the set n conforms, its sub-set n--I must

likewise conform, it must in principle have been possible for

the scientist to whom only the n--I correlations were available,

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 174 ALAN MONTEFIORE

to have found for that set the order which would fit the more

inclusive set n, an order which would have enabled him on the

basis of the n--I correlations alone to have predicted the nth.

In other words, for any set of correlations for which it may be

possible to find a teleologically formulated order, it must also

be possible to find some non-teleological order which would in

principle permit of whatever predictions the teleological order

would permit; although, as Noble points out, "this is not to

say that it might not be conceptually difficult to discover nor

that it might not sometimes be rather odd or implausible."

The context in which Noble produces this argument is that

of his contention that the question whether we choose to work

with, or to accept as explanatory, the teleological or the non-

teleological order in cases like this, cannot itself be considered a

purely empirical, in no way conceptual matter. (This point

seems to be different from, though it may be related to, Sprigge's

point about different descriptions reflecting different interests.)

Noble is here concerned to rebut Taylor's explicit insistence

that it is a purely empirical question whether any given range

of phenomena is governed by laws of teleological or non-

teleological form-though Taylor in fact makes it clear, in

Chapter V of The Explanation of Behaviour,' that he does not

really believe in any invariable, sharp line of demarcation

between the areas of the empirical and the purely conceptual.

On the other hand, he would, if I understand him rightly,

wish to resist this particular argument of Noble's on the grounds

that considerations of a mathematical type as to the possibilities

of producing unending varieties of order under which to sub-

sume any given set of n--I, n or n+ otherwise disconnected

correlations would of themselves provide no help at all to the

scientist faced with his n--I correlations and trying to guess

which of the orders under which he could subsume them might

help him to extrapolate most accurately to the nth.

In fact, the empirical question/conceptual question aspect of

this matter hardly seems to provide any very substantial ground

for major dispute. Whether any particular form of order will

continue to fit a given range of phenomena as further facts about

it continue to come to light is obviously an empirical question;

whether any given ordering of the phenomena may seem close

enough to what the scientists concerned may regard as the

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 FINAL CAUSES 175

acceptable corpus of established science to be counted as having

any genuine explanatory power or as being able justifiably to

take the weight of such successful predictions as may be based

on it, is very largely a conceptual one. It hardly seems to be of

urgent relevance to ask whether scientists in general may find

it more helpful to try to think of some overtly teleological

formula rather than to spot that non-teleological order which

may best fit the n--I instances and still continue to work for

the nth and the nth + I. The immediate issue is surely whether

a teleological principle of the sort that Taylor seems here to

be thinking of is or is not equivalent to some overall Humean

generalisation rather than whether either of them is equivalent

to (or can lead directly to the discovery of) some theoretical

ordering of all the possible mechanisms or routes through which

the general teleological or Humean principle, whichever it

may be, may in practice be realised. In fact, of course, as soon

as one starts talking of different forms of ordering relationships

and of their relations to established bodies of scientific theory,

one is already implicitly going beyond the realm of simple

Humean generalisations. But we shall have to return to this

point.

What about Sprigge's arguments against Taylor's so-called

weaker claim? A main point to notice is that Sprigge quite

explicitly pushes his argument through to claim not only that

all teleological laws can be given an (efficient) causal form, but

that the converse also holds, namely that causal laws, including

the most basic ones, can be given a teleological form; for do

they not "in effect say that in any situation, things of a certain

kind, or perhaps material things in general, will do whatever

is required in order that they continue to move in a certain

direction of change ?" In this way he brings out very clearly

the ground of the claim that it must always be possible to

replace a teleological law by an effectively equivalent law of

efficient causation; it is that the Humean regularities on which

the one must be based can always be regarded as the basis for

the other. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of

both causal and teleological explanation being seen as actually

consisting in differently weighted presentations of, or references

to, the same relevant Humean regularities.)

How should one interpret Taylor as reacting against this

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 176 ALAN MONTEFIORE

argument? Presumably somewhat as follows: Of course one

can say, if one likes, that things will do whatever is required

for them to behave in precisely the way in which they will

as a matter of fact behave. But there would not normally be

much point in stressing this logical truth. What one wants in

practice is always some kind of law or collection of laws or

theory which will tell us in what particular ways things will

happen in contrast to the ways in which they will not. And

there may be cases in which we may only be able to get this

from the teleological form of the law.

It is to this last assertion that Taylor consistently returns;

and it is just this that Sprigge is now calling into question. As

debate has repeatedly appeared to get stuck over this point,

it will be as well to try following it through in the detail of

one or two examples. One that Taylor himself has suggested

on occasion is that of a scatter of fallen leaves which have the

odd behavioural characteristic of reforming themselves directly

into a given pattern from whatever other order or disorder

into which they may have fallen or been disturbed. Surely,

Taylor has claimed, we should have to say that the leaves do

whatever is required to return by the most direct available

routes to their favoured configuration; but this description is

manifestly non-intrinsic and we can hardly hope to arrive in

advance of the occurrence of the movements to be predicted

or explained at just that unitary overall formula of intrinsic

description which will cover the infinitely varied alternative

movements, which the leaves may go through in order to return

to the 'goal-configuration' from the infinitely varied alternative

orders and disorders into which they may fall or be disturbed.

But just why should this be so? First, let us make explicit

note of the equivalence at what we may call the outer level

of the teleological law 'Under appropriate conditions these

leaves (and, presumably, any others relevantly like them) will,

ceteris paribus, move in whatever ways are required in order to

arrive by the shortest routes at configuration G' with the Hum-

ean generalisation 'The event of leaves of the relevant sort

finding themselves in any one of the relevantly possible family

of configurations other than G is followed by their regular

movement by the shortest routes to G'. The expression 'under

appropriate conditions' points to the same limits as the phrase

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 FINAL CAUSES 177

'the relevantly possible family of conditions'; that is to say,

we may suppose that if the leaves are too grossly disturbed,

they may no longer exhibit the specified pattern of behaviour-

if, perhaps, a certain distance between those furthest from

each other is exceeded, or that between any one leaf and its

nearest neighbour. Of course, there may appear not to be any

such restriction; and of course, too, we may get our initial

characterisation wrong of such restrictions as there appear to

be. But these empirical uncertainties affect both the teleological

and the Humean forms of the law in equal degree. Similarly,

the ceteris paribus clause may be taken in just the same way in

each formulation to refer to those abnormal but explicable

intervening conditions which may modify or even prevent the

normal direct movement-to-G behaviour from taking place.

So far, so good. But now we approach the crunch of this

example. On what basis are we going to be able to predict the

movement behaviour of the leaves on the next occasion that

they are disturbed from the configuration G? Suppose that we

answer in the following apparently simple way: As soon as the

precise terms of the disturbance are specified, it is a straight-

forward geometrical exercise to work out the paths along which

the leaves would have to move to return to G by the most

direct routes; if there are certain types of obstruction lying

along these routes, certain physical calculations may be

involved as well. We still have to insist on the question of

whether we are to say that a prediction based on such a

calculation would be making use of the teleological or the Hum-

ean form of the law. According to Taylor's criterion, an in-

trinsic, non-teleological description of the behaviour B that is

to be predicted or explained, should not include any in-

eliminable reference to the end-state G towards which the

behaviour is tending; if we are struck with any such reference,

we have to say that the behaviour is directed. So are we to say

that the specification of the routes of leaf movement from dis-

turbed order D to the stable configuration G contains, in its

reference to G, an irreducibly teleological element ?

Despite the apparently direct clarity of this question, I in

fact find myself inclined both to agree that a reference to G is

bound to be implicit, if not actually explicit, in any specification

of B; and yet that in this type of case at any rate this ought not

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 178 ALAN MONTEFIORE

to be counted as sufficient to mark the behaviour as teleological.

After all, do we not have the simple observational sequence of

leaves finding themselves in any of a set of positions D being

followed by their movement to G-and what is unHumean

about this description? The ambivalence arises perhaps from

the way in which D must itself be specified. For the specification

of a set D must in effect amount to one of a set of positions,

falling within a given range, that are not themselves G. In this

case to speak of a move from a D to G is ipso facto to speak of

a move from a within-the-range not-G to G; and the expression

'not-G' can certainly be held to include a reference to G. But

surely one does not therefore have to regard a move from not-G

to G as teleologically oriented in virtue of this form of descrip-

tion? After all, any move whatsoever may be regarded as a

move from not-G to G, and any regular set of such moves may

be regarded as exhibiting a Humean law, providing only that

the relevant range of positions other than G be specified

accurately and, perhaps, narrowly enough. But if we can say

that Ds (or not-Gs) within the relevant range are regularly

transformed into G, and if furthermore we can exhaustively

specify the environmental constraints that may exist on the

movements of objects such as leaves-constraints which may

themselves be specified in strictly causal terms and which will

not therefore introduce any independent elements of teleology,

then we can specify the paths through which such a regular

transformation must take place in any specific set of cir-

cumstances D (or not-G), if all other relevant known regularities

are to be maintained. They are those paths which are jointly

'determined' by the Humean law 'Not-Gs become G' and all

those other Humean (and geometrical) laws which, in so far as

they in fact hold, must be taken as describing the moves

physically open to objects such as leaves as they pass from

not-Gs to G. We can, of course, say, if we like, that the leaves

have taken, are taking, will take the particular set of paths, say,

(D)n + 3--G, because these are the paths that the situation

(D)n + 3 requires them to take if they are to get to G by the

shortest available routes; we can equally well say that the

leaves will take these paths if the sequences 'D (or not-G) -+G'

and all other relevant Humean sequences continue as regularly as

hitherto.

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 FINAL CAUSES 179

It may be that the peculiarly spatial, geometric aspects of

this example serve to obscure as well as to simplify the main

shape of the argument; so let us see how it applies to antelopes

and lions. We notice, as Sprigge points out, that the event of a

lion seeing an antelope is (within a certain range of cir-

cumstances) regularly followed by that of the lion killing the

antelope "in the most economical manner conformable to more

basic laws of nature". But what manner precisely is that ? Have

we not got to specify it as whatever manner may be required

in the particular situation in which the lion next finds itself, if

the killing of the antelope is to follow? Well, yes-in a sense.

But we can also say that once we are able to give a full specifica-

tion of the set of circumstances under which the lion will next

see an antelope, then the Humean generalisation "'Lion sees

antelope' is followed by 'Lion kills antelope' " together with all

the other Humean generalisations, which may be taken as

summing up the observed boundary conditions of what lions do

or not do in such specified physical circumstances, must fully

specify the path which the lion will take towards the killing of

the antelope, if all these sequences are to continue with their

hitherto observed regularity.

Taylor could, of course, perfectly well insist that we are most

unlikely to approach with any close degree of accuracy either

a full specification in intrinsic terms of the next 'Lion sees

antelope' situation or a full listing of all those other relevant

Humean generalisations which would enable us to make the

full interlocking set of essentially separate ceteris paribus predic-

tions about lions' behaviour in situations such as those specified.

Quite so. But the same imprecisions must equally affect the

parallel, apparently teleologically based prediction. "The lion

will do whatever is required in situation (D)n+3 in order to

kill the antelope." But again, what is that precisely? We have

to specify the full environmental situation. And once the

situation is fully specified, how do we then know that it is

precisely this form of behaviour rather than that which will be

produced ? Well, only if we have a full knowledge of the range

of behaviour open to lions in situations such as that specified,

on the assumption that all the known normal regularities of

lion behaviour are to continue to hold. In that case we shall

indeed be able to work out what will be the lion's most

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 180 ALAN MONTEFIORE

economical available route to the killing of the antelope. But

now we are going round in Spriggean circles. The lion will do

whatever is required for it to do in order to maintain all known

regularities of lion behaviour, including that relating to the

regular killing of antelopes-or else some of these regularities

will turn out not to be constant after all. Is this a mechanical, a

teleological or a merely Humean situation?

It might still be argued, however, that Taylor has already

dealt with this whole family of arguments on page 13 of The

Explanation of Behaviour in his discussion of Nagel's system S,

which, like a thermostat, maintains a state G through the

operation of the compensatory mechanisms of its three com-

ponents A, B and C ? For as long as we characterise the changes

in B and C as 'compensating' for any change in A that would

carry S out of G, our account remains teleological in form. We

escape from teleology only if we can produce generalisations of

the form "whenever A changes from Am to An, then B changes

from Bx to By and C. . . , etc. Thus, for instance, we would be

able to express the antecedents for a given change in B, say,

which in fact produces G, in terms of the states of A and C."

But even to talk of the paths which the leaves must take if the

regularity 'configuration D--- configuration G' is to hold, or of

the behaviour which the lion must emit if the regularity 'lion

sees antelope-* lion kills antelope' is, along with all the other

allegedly relevant regularities, to continue constant, is to

characterise the behavioural changes by reference to the

relevant G.

The answer to this is: Yes, it is true if one knows all the

generalisations relevant to the behaviour of, say a thermostat,

one will be able to characterise its behaviour in response to

relevant changes in its environment step by step and without

referring to G until one gets there, so to speak.8 It is also true,

however, that one may have noted the constancy of its return

to G before knowing anything very much about the constancies

involved in the varying changes of A, B and C. At that stage

one will be able to predict only (i) that the thermostat will,

within the limits of whatever boundary conditions obtain, con-

tinue to return to G from whatever other (non-G) state may,

temporarily, be imposed upon it: (ii) that it will do this through

whatever changes in A, B and C (a) respect all known and

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 FINAL CAUSES 181

discoverable regularities in the behaviour of As, Bs and Cs

under the relevant conditions, and (b) lead through regular

sequence to G. (b) may sound teleological in Taylor's terms,

but it is only the restatement of the regularity that was noted

at the beginning and which one may suppose will continue as

such. To the extent that we may suppose ourselves to know all

the relevant intervening regularities as well as those which we

need in order to delimit the normally relevant boundary con-

ditions, the restatement of (b), the spanning regularity so to

speak, becomes otiose. But we must notice that until we

accumulate all this knowledge, it will not help us to fully

specific prediction of the detailed compensatory mechanisms of

the (thermostatic) system that we recast our generalisation

about S's regular return to G in openly teleological terms. 'S

will do whatever is required to return to G'; but what exactly

is that? "Well, in Dn+3 it requires certain adjustments of A,

B and C." But what adjustments precisely? Perhaps there

is more than one set of adjustments that would do; or perhaps

there is only one set that could lead to G. Could there be more

than one set available to the system in the particular (intrinsic)

situation in which it would find itself at Dn + 3 ? If so, what

might determine the set of adjustments that the system actually

undergoes ? At any rate we know that there must be at least

one set, if our hitherto observed regularity that S does return to

G is to continue to hold; so this, taken together with our

knowledge of other regularities concerning the behaviour either

of systems such as S or of certain of its constituent elements,

may give direction to our search for and, hopefully, discovery

of more detailed 'intervening' regularities. There is--of course

-a continual process of adjustment, of filling in and of reformu-

lation of broader and narrower, more general and more

specific statements of regularities of all these sorts.

So far, so-on the whole-Sprigge. But it is at this point that

I should tentatively part company with him to rejoin what I,

again tentatively, think should have been, or perhaps really is,

something more like Taylor's position. Let us return to our

examples.

As Taylor himself shows clearly enough in the first part of

his article in the Borger/Cioffi collection-a section with

which Borger, incidentally, expresses himself in almost total

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 182 ALAN MONTEFIORE

agreement-a mere collection of regularities goes comparatively

little way to explaining the regular occurrence of the events

over which they range. We find a set or sets of fallen leaves

which regularly behave in the surprising ways outlined above;

the leaves regularly move from any configuration D to con-

figuration G or they do whatever is required to maintain

configuration D. Either way their behaviour still seems extra-

ordinary; we want an explanation. Consider, then, the two

following possible outline accounts: A. The leaves are somehow

magnetised in such a way as to act upon each other (as long as

they fall into a D which leaves them within acting range) so as

to propel or to attract each other into configuration G. The

regularity of their movements reflects the nature of the under-

lying forces involved. B. The leaves have some conception of the

configuration G as a preferred state and somehow seek to main-

tain or to return to it in the light of this conception. Both of

these are putative explanations, however unlikely they may

seem of this anyhow unlikely event, in that they go deeper and

are more general than the regularities that they seek to explain.

Both are fully compatible with an account of the phenomena

in terms of (sets of) regularities, whether that account be given

in Humean causal or in what we have so far been calling

teleological form. (Indeed, they must be so compatible, if we

are to be able to identify the regularities to be explained in

terms independent of the theories that may variously be pro-

posed in an attempt to explain them.) But they are not, as

explanations, compatible with each other. Why not ?

The brief answer, or a brief and rough formulation of the

answer, to this question seems to me to be that both these

accounts, A and B, involve not merely sets of contingently

linked, contingent regularities, each relating to groups of

logically 'separate existences', but in addition the more or less

fully articulated structures of internally self-interlocking

theories; and that there can be no explanatory room for two

theories of these particular sorts, each claiming to give different,

but in principle full-bloodedly explanatory accounts of the

same fact.9

It is a fundamental condition of Humean objects or events

that they must be fully identifiable in terms which in no

way encroach on the contingency of the relationships into

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 FINAL CAUSES 183

which they may enter or of the generalisations which, as good

Humeans, we may be able to form about them. It is no doubt

because of the manifest importance of insisting on the irreduc-

ible element of contingency that must be carried by any

scientific explanation that the impulse is still so strong, even at

times in those who are most fully aware of the structural element

also irreducibly embodied in any scientific-or, I should be

inclined to say indeed, pre-scientific-identification of objects,

to account for the nature of efficient causal explanation in

straightforwardly Humean terms. Within the terms of an

essentially diachronical and fully structured theory, however,

the identification of a set of objects at one moment in time is

linked, logically, if one likes to say so, or at any rate concep-

tually, to the identification of other objects at other moments

of time.

It will be evident that in risking this bald assertion, I am

venturing, very uncomfortably, on to the ground of overlap

between a number of centrally controversial issues in the theory

of knowledge and the philosophy of science; and happily or

unhappily the limits of a contribution to a Joint Session

symposium hardly allow one to be more than speculatively

provocative on such complex matters. Moreover, I should be

quite incapable of following through my fantasy of the magne-

tised leaves in the proper detail of modern magnetic theory. So

to stick once again to stark and simple outline: If one considers

the structure of a paradigmatically mechanical theory of a

classically Newtonian type, one knows very well that if the

values of all variables but one are given, then the value (or the

range of permissible values) of the remaining variable is

uniquely determined. This means to say that insofar as we take

the theory to apply to a given range of phenomena, and insofar

as we have been able to establish the relevant measurements

for all items except one of a given sub-system, then if our

measurement of this one remaining item falls outside the limits

of variation allowed by the demands of the theory, we have to

conclude either that there has been some error of measurement

or that the theory is in part or totally incorrect (or that we have

made some mistake in establishing the boundary conditions of

the sub-system in question) or that we have in fact misidentified

one or more of the phenomena. That is to say, the phenomena

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 184 ALAN MONTEFIORE

of different instants are so related through the structure of the

theory that, as long as we accept our theory as providing proper

forms of identification for the phenomena, we have to say that

what we discover about the phenomenon of one instant tells us

something (necessary) about the phenomena of other instants.

Contingency is preserved not in the regular link between one

phenomenon and another insofar as both the phenomena and

the link between them are characterised as established within

the structure of the theory, but in the application of the theory

as a whole to the range of phenomena in question-here

identified, of course, through terms remaining at least partially

independent of the theory that is proposed.

Of course, this statement of the position, which would any-

how not apply in this form to, say, quantum mechanics, skates

over some large and crucial problems, in particular those of the

different sorts of relationships, taxonomic or causal, that may

be established between the terms of different levels of theoretical

discourse and those through which one may first identify the

range of phenomena to which the theory in particular question

may or may not be judged to apply. If the two were identical

and if the theory were both fully structured and fully deter-

minate, contingency would effectively disappear from the scene;

on the other hand, the notion of theoretically wholly innocent

terms, which would be neutral with respect to any conceptually

interlocking structure, is surely a myth. In the temptations of

the first possibility may lie a central error of rationalist theories

of explanation; in the latter insight, their central truth. But

however this may be, it seems inevitable that in many practical

situations of scientific advance there should be varying types of

interrelationships between terms having primary roots in

theoretical structures of different levels, where often, no doubt,

the precise nature and extent of these interrelations is only more

or less imperfectly perceived as they undergo a continual pro-

cess of adjustment and readjustment.

Nevertheless, when all due allowance has been made for the

crudities of this present sketch, it may serve to point towards

the source of that air of partial unreality which seems to infect

some stretches of the Sprigge/Taylor/Noble debates. Naturally,

there are no theoretical constraints governing our understand-

ing of such concepts as 'leaf', 'configuration', 'lion', 'kill',

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 FINAL CAUSES 185

'antelope' and so on, such as to encroach in any way on the

contingency of the regularities presumed in the examples that

we have taken. (Which is by no means to say, of course, that

they are so free of all theoretical or semi-theoretical constraints

that any event in the specification of which one of these terms

occurred could conceivably be followed by any other event

whatsoever; for example, "'Lion killing antelope' is regularly

followed by 'Lion running after antelope' ". I do not know

whether such a sequence might not feature intelligibly within

some framework of mythology; it could not do so within that

of our present non-mythological understanding of the animal

kingdom.) But any more basic (Newtonian) mechanical

explanation of the regularities which constitute any of the

examples we have used would be couched in terms which

carried much more systematically interlocking commitments.

Insofar as the elements to be explained (or predicted) were then

reidentified through these theoretically structured terms, the

regularities would be transposed out of their Humean key into

one of theoretically necessary connections and hence, when

temporal direction is taken into account, of production of later

events by earlier ones.

What was 'unreal', then, about, for instance, the earlier treat-

ment of our examples in terms of purely Humean generalisa-

tions came out pretty clearly in my attempted reference to the

existence of boundary conditions under which alone the leaves

might return by the most direct routes to G or lions proceed

in the most economical fashion to the killing of antelopes. For

where, in those contexts in which I was striving for at any rate

surface consistency, I was talking of the regularities exhibited

in the behaviour of the one or the other under given physical

conditions, it would actually have been more natural and more

appropriate to talk of the conditions under which such move-

ments were physically possible. Indeed, this was the way in

which, somewhat improperly and inconsistently, I allowed my-

self to speak for some of the time. For within the terms of

reference of a mechanically orientated structure of explanation,

all events are in principle to be understood as fully determined

by the nature of their relationships to surrounding events, and

reciprocally; and while it is true that within this perspective

the future may be taken as specifying the present and past just

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 186 ALAN MONTEFIORE

as much as it is specified by them, for immediate purposes the

crucially relevant aspect of this interrelationship is that the past

and the present fully specify the future. And this is a specifica-

tion which is quite independent of that which is carried, linking

present to future, by the intentional commitments of fully

teleological language.

'Quite independent'; but does independence here involve

incompatibility? John Lucas has recently put the matter in

the following way: " . . . it seems to follow from there being a

complete causal explanation of something that no other

explanation of it could be admitted, except in a merely deriva-

tive capacity. If we have given a complete regularity explana-

tion of everything, there is nothing else for any rational

explanation to explain . ". "10 In the immediate context in

which he makes it, his point seems to come out a little differently

from that which I am here suggesting in that Lucas there

writes of rational explanation rather than of teleological

explanation in general and in terms of apparent identification

of explanations in terms of causal efficiency with explanations

in terms of regularities; and as I have tried to indicate, it seems

to me rather that the contingent regularities in the phenomena,

which must certainly exist at some level of relatively non-

theoretical description if any fully determinate mechanical

theory is to hold true of them, cannot at the level of their con-

tingence be identifiable solely through terms which are already

embedded within the structure of such an explanatory theory.

Nevertheless, if one allows for the relevant transpositions, it

seems to me that Lucas' point holds. As Taylor is, of

course, fully aware, a genuinely teleological explanation

involves the characterisation of the relevant present event in

terms which depict it as determined in its present state by

reference to some future event. But what can be meant by this

expression 'by reference to some future event'? Enough has

been written about the difficulties, if not the absurdities, of

backward causation; this is not an occasion on which to return

to that reasonably well-trodden ground. But neither can it be

satisfactory to try simply to translate out this non-contingent

reference to the future in terms of the independently identifiable

contingent regularities, which again must certainly obtain at

some appropriate level of conceptualisation, in traditionally

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 FINAL CAUSES 187

Humean manner, if the explanation in terms of intentional

concepts is to hold. The Humean regularities would be the

same, whether the underlying explanation turn out to be

mechanical or teleological;"1 which itself might seem a fair

indication of the impossibility of actually translating either of

these theoretically structural explanations in terms of simple

regularities. (Though if one does make this translation, of

course, then one must in all consistency take the Spriggean line

of regarding the explanations in mechanical and teleological

terms as themselves intertranslatable.)

So what is the nature of the teleological reference to the

future ? Without necessarily wanting to endorse all that he has

said on the matter, it seems to me that Taylor has himself done

quite sufficient work on intentional concepts, most notably

perhaps in his article on 'Explaining Actions',12 to make it sur-

prising that he should at times appear to go so far along with

the acceptance of Humean regularities as constituting the

proper terms of debate between him and his opponents. As he

makes clear, to explain an action in intentional terms is, but at

the same time is not simply, to explain it as arising by way of

not necessarily invariable succession to some kind of conception

which the agent will have had of some relevant future state of

affairs. We all know not only that intentions, desires, etc., are

not simple sufficient causes of the actions that it is intended or

desired should take place, but also that there is no logical

invariability about the passage from intention to intended

action. We simply do not always do what we intend, desire,

want, etc. to do. But equally it is inconceivable both that we

should never act on our intentions, desires, wants, etc., and that

our actions should always fail. The logically or conceptually

necessary connections between the intention, the act and the

future result are not ones of invariable sequence, but they are

necessary ones all the same.

It is this intentionally, non-invariable but still necessary

connection that provides a basis, perhaps the only 'real' basis,

for our understanding of truly teleological explanation. Its full

articulation obviously demands much more space than is here

available, even if I felt that I knew exactly how to articulate it.

But, to return a last time to our examples, we can say that if the

leaves seek to return to configuration G in virtue of their own

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 188 ALAN MONTEFIORE

or of some 'designer's' conception of it as a preferred state of

affairs, or if the lion-more plausibly-seeks to kill the antelope

in virtue of his (maybe we have to say quasi-) conception of it

as a source of desired food, then we can start to spell out afresh

the nature of our explanation of the relevant B as taking place

for the sake of a G, which either the subjects themselves or some

underlying 'designer' had already conceived of as a to-be-

aimed-at future state while the system was still in SE; always

remembering that if SE did include this conception of G as

desirable or to be aimed at, then we must suppose that, if not

on this particular occasion, at least on a significant proportion

of similar occasions the holding of such conceptions must be

(have been/will be) followed both by a B likely, or thinkable

of as likely, to be a sufficient productive cause of G and, on

some significant further sub-set of occasions, by G itself.

Clearly there may be cases in which the disjunction between the

immediate and remoter 'agent's' and 'designer's' conception or

purpose is not an exclusive one, and there may be various

relations of compatibility or tension between them.

Now, an explanation based on this form of diachronically

interlocking structure is incompatible with one given in terms

of mechanically efficient causation. The events (phenomena) to

be explained cannot be equally and simultaneously reinter-

pretable out of the terms of their initial identification as separate

Humean existences into those of two different but each more

or less systematically interlocking diachronic structures. More-

over, if we find ourselves in a situation where each of such

different (and in principle mutually independent) explanatory

structures is on offer, Taylor is right, as Lucas is right, to insist

that it is the mechanical explanation which will drive out the

teleological one. This obviously does not mean that the homing

rocket will no longer present those systematic behavioural

regularities which enable us to continue talking of it, without

internal inconsistency, in teleological terms. But once we know

that the underlying explanation is mechanical, we know ipso

facto that its behaviour is in one very important sense not

'really' or autonomously goal-directed; either it has no con-

ception of what it is doing or, if it does, its conceptions have no

directly causal relevance to what it does; if it alters course in a

given direction, it is sufficient, to explain its movements as

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 FINAL CAUSES 189

necessary, that we refer to what has gone before; a reference

to a final G may, certainly, be implied by, but does not have

to be referred to as a necessary part of the explanation. (Except,

no doubt, in the sense that we may wish to speak of the purposes

of the designer.)

Thus, although a predictive reference to a final G must be

taken as being contained within the terms of a 'full' mechanical

explanation, the distinguishing point remains that, once the

temporal direction is given, the path of mechanical explana-

tion is, so to speak, linear, while that of teleological explanation

is not; or to put it another way, one's account of a strictly

mechanical system is temporally invertible, while that of a

teleological system is not. For example:-In mechanical

explanation we have an initial stimulus leading to a form of

behaviour, which in turn leads on to a state which may be

called the goal; the behaviour may be accompanied by a con-

ception held by the agent of the goal-(the notion of accompani-

ment may be taken as covering a certain variety of possible

temporal relations), but for the explanation to be fully mechani-

cal it cannot depend on the conception for any intervening

causal efficacy. In teleological explanation we have a stimulus

leading to the holding of a conception, which in turn only leads

to the relevant behaviour via its necessary forward reference to

the goal state, G, to which in a significant number of cases the

behaviour must lead by paths now of normal causal efficiency.

Here the conception is no mere accompaniment with no further

causal contribution of its own to make in the production of G

of which it is a conception; it is on the contrary an integral link

in the teleological causal chain.

Seen from this point of view, it is Sprigge's view that "it seems

incongruous to regard consciousness or awareness as a causal

agent in that world of which it is an awareness" that is itself

incongruous. Certainly, his view is entirely and admirably con-

sistent both with his own equation of efficient and teleological

causation on the basis of their common analysis in terms of

Humean regularities and/or with a wholehearted acceptance of

a fully mechanistic model of explanation at the expense of a fully

teleological one. (Though even this needs qualifying: as far as

the formal structure of either the independent regularity or the

fully mechanistic views are concerned, consciousness could

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 g190 ALAN MONTEFIORE

perfectly well turn out to be a causal agent of one sort or

another-for example, it might cause sweating; the point is

simply that it could not be a causal agent in what might be

called its own conscious or intentional direction.) But-as Taylor

again makes clear in his Inquiry article-it is quite incompatible

with all the assumptions of our ordinary ways of conceiving

mental or intentional phenomena, and hence quite incompatible

with the categories of teleological explanation in the sense in

which I have been trying to explicate it.

I am conscious both of exceeding my proper ration of space

and yet of having done no more than skate rather messily on only

a part of the surface of this tangled set of questions. I must end,

however, with just two final and abrupt points.

The first is simply that one way of stating the modification that

I should propose to Taylor's position, as he has hitherto tended

to express it, is that one should regard teleological explanation

as resting not so much on the form of laws taken in apparent

independence each of all others, but on the characteristic struc-

ture of systems-theoretical systems or, if one prefers to look at

it in that way, systems at the level at which the phenomena may

be seen as organised.

The second concerns my half suggestion that it might be only

those systems to which conceptions can be thought of as some-

how 'belonging' that may be countable as fully teleological. The

point that I had in mind was that only a system in which the

order of theoretically necessary explanation binds present and

future events in some temporally 'non-linear' way would seem

to be countable as teleological in the relevant sense; and I have

tried to illustrate the nature of such a binding by reference to

certain action directed conceptions and their intentional nature.

I can not at present think of any other way in which such a

binding could be illustrated. This should not be taken, however,

as constituting any sort of a priori exclusion of, say, a physiological

theory some of whose basic concepts might exhibit the same

logical structure and which might provide, therefore, a much

more intelligible foundation for that physiological 'mapping' of

belief states of which Sprigge, among others, speaks. One may

suspect, no doubt, that any relaxation of tension which such a

physiology might achieve in its relations with psychology would

be purchased at the price of an increase in tension elsewhere in

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 FINAL CAUSES 191

its relations with the other physical sciences. But one may suspect,

too, that one can never hope finally to eliminate such tensions,

but at best to shift them around. At any rate this is an appro-

priately speculative note on which to stop.

REFERENCES

1 Among the many friends who have helped me with critical discussions

of earlier versions of this paper, particularly grateful thanks are due to

Charles Taylor, Denis Noble, David McFarland and Rom Harr6 (all of

whom, I should add, continue to disagree with me on one point or another).

2 Analysis, Jan. 1967 and Dec. 1967.

3 Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, Eds. R. Borger and F. Cioffi, pp.

8o-88.

4 Analysis, Mar. 1967 and Explanation in the Behavioural Sciences, pp. 89-95.

One should mention also, of course, Taylor's discussion of the views of

Ernest Nagel ("Teleological Explanations and Teleological Systems" in

Feigl and Brodbeck (Eds.), Readings in the Philosophy of Science) on p. 13 of

The Explanation of Behaviour.

1 Op. cit., p. 8o.

6 Op. cit., p. 84-

SSee, for example, p. io6.

8 Some people would appear to argue that as good a way as any of

marking the distinction between teleological and non-teleological systems

is to make it coincide with that between those systems which do and those

which do not include elements of physical feed-back. On this view a thermo-

stat would come out as a fully teleological system. Within the present limits

of space all I can say on this point is (i) that the distinction is, of course, a

real one, but (ii) that it is maybe not so clear as all that (can one draw a

really sharp line between mathematical and physical feed-back?); and

(iii) that the crucial questions will still concern the nature of the theory

through which one may account for the mechanisms by which the system

achieves its feed-back results.

9 I am not suggesting, however, that it is never possible to give two quite

different explanatory accounts of the same set of facts, which may be com-

plementary to rather than incompatible with each other. Denis Noble has

pointed out to me that we can quite consistently imagine someone giving

alternative thermodynamic and kinetic accounts of the movements of the

leaves, accounts which would be neither equivalent nor obvious all-out

rivals to each other. Unfortunately, lack of space here prevents me from

trying to comment on Noble's further suggestion that thermodynamics

might be considered as an in some sense teleological system; or on the fact,

pointed out by David McFarland, that a more adequate account of the

leaves example would have to allow for their having in reality not one,

but two "goals", that of economy of movement as well as the final con-

figuration G, and for the various ways in which these goals may interfere

with or have to be set off against each other. It would also have to allow

for the possibility of their making what might be interpreted as detours on

their way to their goals. A mathematical version of such an account might

typically lead one to speak of the system of leaves as either tending to or

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 192 ALAN MONTEFIORE

aiming at the maximisation of certain mathematical functions. Suffice it

here to say that while such varied considerations would certainly involve

further complications, I do not (at present) think that they would compel

any fundamental changes in my present consciously over-simple presenta-

tion of the position.

10 The Freedom of the Will, p. 49.

1x If this by now appears obvious with respect to non-verbalising

"systems" such as lions, it may seem less so in the case of at least partly

articulate "systems" such as man. Clearly, we have not to understand

"reasons for actions" in terms of the same patterns of regularly succeeding

events as "causes of behaviour". Nevertheless, if we are to give sufficient

differential explanations or predictions of actions (as compared with merely

showing them to be intelligible or likely), then we must refer, at least

implicitly, to some associated sets of regularities-which must include,

incidentally, a significant number whose integrating explanation will be

in terms of ordinary efficient causation. Of course, some people might hold

that it is an important feature of teleological systems that we must under-

stand why it must be that some of their actions may remain partially

inexplicable.

12 Inquiry, Summer, 1970.

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